Forget basketball when the son heads back to school this year. Boxing, too. The biggest sport of the new century is mixed martial arts, and it's time to start grooming your champion.

Let's be honest: No child has really considered karate a "sport" since the days of wax-on, wax-off — and no father has really wanted his son to be anything less than a varsity captain since the days of, well, we can't remember when. But now the age of MMA is upon us, and many youngsters are looking up to Dana White more than their local NFL quarterbacks. And so, a compromise: it is no longer impossible for today's twelve-year-old Brazilian Jujuitsu prodigy to become tomorrow's Brett Favre.

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"Kids see these guys go into the ring on TV and want to be like them," says Anthony Colon of Steve Sohn's New York City Krav Maga Martial Arts School. "It's exactly like how kids used to look up to Hulk Hogan — but they have new icons and role models, like GSP (Georges St-Pierre) and Rashad Evans. These guys were iron workers who had nothing, and now they have a lot of money."

Of course, it's about discipline and confidence, not earthly rewards. But it's also about rapid-fire, adrenaline-pumping combat training. Instead of karate's repetitive katas (a series of choreographed solo movements), Colon says that in MMA kids "do two minutes of punching, two minutes of kicking, two minutes of sprawling." Hey, it beats golf, now that Tiger Woods isn't much of a role model.

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Besides, karate lessons didn't really help a generation of bullied kids who discovered that fights almost always degenerated into on-the-ground chaos — no polish, no finesse, no twirling butterfly kicks. Those skills, which might've impressed tournament judges, were useless against street-savvy brawlers. Alan Belcher can personally testify; he started training at eight years old, and eighteen years later he's a top five UFC middleweight. If a child is attacked, "knowing karate isn't going to help very much," Belcher says, "but BJJ gives them a fighting chance."

Like Belcher's MMA Kids, fighting schools have opened in every major American city, usually charging $50 to $150 per month depending on location. More than the price of a soccer ball, yes, but Gregg Thompson, a BJJ trainer in Florida — also a defensive tactics instructor for the Orange County Sheriff's Office and a former Marine, so probably not a guy to mess with — says that children don't really need that much training: "BJJ involves a lot of movements that are natural for kids, since most of them are already grappling with each other from an early age." It's a quick hop from a sibling rivalry to a black belt.

Be warned: the kids will also experience unmistakable pain, so overprotective parents will have to check themselves. Well-executed movements and joint-manipulations aren't fun, and tapping out too late can result in a hyper-extended elbow, dislocated shoulder or worse.

But soon, perhaps, they'll be ready for counterintelligence missions abroad. "This training has grown immensely, especially since 9/11," says Colon of the NYC Krav Maga school. "People want to protect themselves from guns, knives, baseball bats and terrorists. The simple fact is that it's not nice out there."